Maintainer's Corner

Readme for propellor-2.15.3

Propellor is a
configuration management system using Haskell and Git.
Each system has a list of properties, which Propellor ensures
are satisfied.

Propellor is configured via a git repository, which typically lives
in ~/.propellor/ on your development machine. Propellor clones the
repository to each host it manages, in a
secure way. See
components
for details.

Properties are defined using Haskell. Edit ~/.propellor/config.hs
to get started. There is fairly complete
API documentation,
which includes many built-in Properties for dealing with
Apt
and
Apache
,
Cron
and
Commands
,
Dns
and
Docker, etc.

There is no special language as used in puppet, chef, ansible, etc.. just
the full power of Haskell. Hopefully that power can be put to good use in
making declarative properties that are powerful, nicely idempotent, and
easy to adapt to a system's special needs!

quick start

Run propellor for the first time. It will set up a ~/.propellor/ git
repository for you.

If you don't have a gpg private key already, generate one: gpg --gen-key

Run: propellor --add-key $KEYID, which will make propellor trust
your gpg key, and will sign your ~/.propellor repository using it.

Edit ~/.propellor/config.hs, and add a host you want to manage.
You can start by not adding any properties, or only a few.

Run: propellor --spin $HOST

Now you have a simple propellor deployment, but it doesn't do
much to the host yet, besides installing propellor.
So, edit ~/.propellor/config.hs to configure the host, add some
properties to it, and re-run step 6.
Repeat until happy and move on to the next host. :)

Once you have a lot of hosts, and running propellor --spin HOST for
each host becomes tiresome, you can
automate that.